


the body

by bodysnatch3r



Series: THE VOICE IS STILLED [5]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:33:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24526183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: When Robert Allgood dies, the light dies with him.
Relationships: Robert Allgood/Louise Allgood (OFC), Robert Allgood/Original Female Character(s)
Series: THE VOICE IS STILLED [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1725325
Kudos: 5





	the body

**now.**

There is a promise men make, when it is late and the blood’s just finished dripping. It is a promise that is heavy, a promise that is dark, and visceral, and made of the same fabric and wood their bones and hearts are made of, a promise that knows how to keep them alive. It is a promise that rests on hands eons after it’s been made, a promise you can trace in the slight contours of another’s palm. It is a promise boys make when they are barely just children, and it is the kind of promise that lasts until they are all dead in the dust, and their children with them, and their children’s children alongside their mother’s smiles.

Louise Allgood has never had to make a promise such as that, she thinks, because she has never known a pain so deep that it would ever have her have to make one in the first place.

Until now, of course, because _ka_ , because life, because _life_ , damn it all, damn it to the _bone_.

Now, she has discovered herself an intimate connoisseur of what pain is and can be. She has learned how to take it to bed with her, she has learned how to make it her own. Pain, this time around, finds out it can sit comfortable in this woman’s eyes, sap them clear of joy, turn them sharp as diamonds. Pain, it finds, reclines best at the corner of her mouth and in her jaw, where it can work the muscles until they clench, where it can work the creases until they tremble. They make a good pair, all in all, not loud nor chaotic nor desperate. 

Once, one instant-long decade, that evening, she spent screaming. But just one. Then pain made her strong.

Oh, Gods forbid, pain made her _angry_.

“How?”

She asks it with a voice that is hoarse from the quiet she’s wrangled it in. Steven, on the other side of Robert’s study, with the light that makes him turn shadow, shifts at the sound of her words. He’s still clutching his hat. Kit does not stop staring at the floor, hands buried in his pockets. If she had any mind to notice patterns, she’d notice that this must be how it feels when an era comes to a close.

“How?” Steven asks back, only his voice is stupidly skittish, wrapped around a question they all know the answer to.

“How. Yes. _How_.”

Kit scoffs somewhere to the side, somewhere Steven doesn’t care or want to look at. It is a small detail, and it sinks into his bowels: “ka-tet” and “broken” ring in the space where his eyes meet the bridge of his nose, but it’s less than a sigh on the wind. Still. One part gone, two left, and an _ache_ and an _ache_ and an _ache._ There is a flash and it’s Kit pounding on Robert’s– _Bob’s chest_ , Bob’s chest to bring him back.

“Protecting _me_ , Louise.”

It didn’t work. 

He died anyway.

For a moment Steven wonders when his life became a synonym for grief, and then that’s swallowed down too, swallowed gone, swallowed empty.

She doesn’t react. There’s a silence to fill.

“I am sorry.”

It feels pointless. Steven does not even know why he’s saying it. _I am sorry_. For what? For existing? For being alive when Bob isn’t? For letting Marten in to begin with? No, that was Henry’s fault, his father’s, say thankya, for trusting a wizard with a glint in his eye. Oh. Oh.

Oh, _damnation_.

* * *

**before.**

Steven Deschain has just realised he must become Cuthbert Allgood’s executioner. He must take into his hands a hatchet that will sever the boy’s heart clean from his chest, and he must do so without his hands shaking. One of those things he knows he can do: he’s killed enough people to know how to murder. The other he _must_ , if only to avoid bleeding the boy to death. There’s no time to think about your own grief when you are trying to keep still the grief of others. Oh, _curse you, old Bob_. Damn you to the _bone_.

He turns to Kit: “How did thee…?”

“Did what?”

“When the fever… Tjaša died, how did thee talk about it with Alain?”

For a moment it looks like Kit will strike him. Then the pain washes back into his eyes, and Steven is starting to learn what they _mean_ when they say that the breaking of a tet can be nothing if not _unimaginable_. They have been taught all their lives that to feel is to break under the weight of the gun, and right now all he can think is that his spine is cracking underneath the heaviness of steel.

Kit sighs.

"Now be not the time, Steven.” Kit says, and knows that Robert would have been the one to say it first. It makes him pause, it makes him close his eyes. He opens them again, clenches and unclenches his fist, and then sighs. There’s a door in front of them they must attend to, and behind it is the boy who carries in his skull the eyes of the recently dead, and he does not know it yet.

“We’ll have to give him his guns.”

Steven says it almost as an afterthought. He thinks of Robert’s hands and then Cuthbert’s, and his mind refuses any inkling of it. He has– to _breathe_ , because his second thought’s about how much Roland looks like his mother.

“Robert was the one who knew how to do these things,” he murmurs. “Not us.”

* * *

Solidity is something that in the face of death becomes annulled. There is nothing solid in a dead body, nothing gracious, nothing real. There is what there is, and that is _flesh_ , but flesh isn’t solid when there’s no life beating through it: it just is. It weighs, of course, but it weighs the way clouds weigh: metaphorically. It just hangs. 

Kit thinks he has seen enough of bodies to know how weightless they can be. Kit thinks there is enough of Tjaša’s lifeless eyes in Robert’s hands contorted around themselves for him to not want to be in the same room with it, and the thought is as shameful as it is terrible. He sees Cuthbert Allgood’s body ripple when he takes it in for good.

“I’ll go fetch Louise and the, and the girls,” Kit says with a glance to Steven, and as he leaves Alain and Roland come in through the door, and Christopher finds his son’s hand for a moment. Then he’s gone, and there’s blank space where he was standing.

* * *

“Cuthbert.”

It’s not the way it should be done. Grief shouldn’t– it cannot– it _mustn’t_ – not here.

Not _here_ , where it is so solid and blank and cold. Cuthbert feels like the sound in his throat isn’t sound at all, just whine, and it, climbs, climbs, climbs, climbs into his eyes, sinks teeth into the back of them until there’s blood that pools right behind them and makes them water. He blinks and no tears spill. He blinks and it feels like sacrilege. He knows he’s making noises, small strangled choking sounds that rattle his lungs, but he’s not sure they’re sobs, not sure they’re _anything really_ , not sure there’s anything anyway.

He never thought the world could go so quietly around his _father’s– body._ It doesn’t click. It’s not enough to make it click, not yet, but it’s a start, a poisoned rotten start, a start strong enough for his brain to curl around the quiet little thought of his father being–

_Not that_.

He looks up to Steven, then, if only to search for answers, because that is what adults _do_ , they give _answers_ , and Steven has no answers for him. Steven Deschain, hat in his hands, looks at him with those eyes that have always been so terrifying, and cannot even say a word.

* * *

How does grief become one? How do you learn to inhabit it? How do you understand it, intimately, in ways that it can be allowed to hold your hand? How do you discover its every breath and every crevice to the point where you can call it home?

Christopher Johns thinks it is done by having grief take the place of those you love. It is a slow process, it is a raw process, a quiet process, a process that can and must be done a million different ways. Kit Johns found his, bit by bit, as they did all, because once you reach a certain age you know it is only a matter of time before they trickle away (all of them, one by one, parents and friends and loved ones, children and wives, the whole lot), especially in war, especially when the skies are as dark as they are.

There is a thought and it’s a thought he has not been allowing himself to listen to. There is a thought and it’s filling with water much too quickly much too fast as he hurries down the hallway of the Allgood estate, the servants murmuring as he goes by, the whispers a contrast to the heaviness of his boots. The thought is, _Handsome Bob will never dance again_ , and it’s a thought he won’t even begin to think belongs anywhere near his brain. Oh, he thought he knew how this would be.

Gods.

The door to Louise’s room is ajar, and he stops himself before he knocks on it when he notices this. He swallows, again, and then pauses, and then does knock.

And she says, “ _Come in_.” and Kit sees her, her hair undone, her face sunken, Ethel and Edna standing beside her like thin columns about to crumble. And Louise Allgood looks at him, once, from head to toe (and she never had the touch, no, not her, not Louise Kreisler who then became Allgood) and then says, and the _quietness of it_ , Kit never wants to remember it, and she says–

“Then it is true.”

* * *

It comes from the back, like a wave that you will never be able to predict. It comes from the back, like a roar, like the night, like the fire on a much too hot summer day.

It comes from behind him, and Cuthbert could recognise his mother’s voice as she screams in a million lifetimes, in a million ways, under a million different twisted skies. He feels his body shake and it begins with his hands and then his shoulders and it racks him, racks him harder than any shivers could, and she had told herself she _would not scream_ , and when it hits Steven it hits him, hits in a way that twists his face into an expression Roland’s never seen. Steven Deschain’s face goes blank, slack, for a second. And then he clenches his jaw. And then he closes his eyes. And Louise, Louise who screams and claws her way through the air all around them, and Steven furrows his brow and Roland sees his father’s frame _shake_ , for a moment, and it is terrifying because never has he seen grief painted so clearly on his father’s face, not even when, _not even when_ –

Cuthbert sees his mother crumble, and she shatters as her head finds his father’s chest, her hands his clothes, her voice the howl of his pale, poisoned skin, and there is something inside of it all, deep down, and then it comes, in waves, in waves, in waves, in waves, over and over and over in his head like a hammer, _he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead_ , and–

Roland’s body collides with his on time to stop him from falling, and _collides_ is the only word he can find now that pain’s annulled him entirely, Roland’s arms under his, his face to Roland’s chest, and there are whispers, of course, in his hair, something about “Bert” and “an-dinh” and “we’re here” because Alain is there too with a hand on his shoulder, and he feels with his cheek the roughness of Roland’s shirt.

He cannot even tell if his mother’s still screaming. There’s just empty inside a noise so loud he can hear his heartbeat like the beating of a sluggish dying drum and then there is a second thought, a shatter in the white inside his head, a shatter and a claw and a bleeding gashing wound, and he whispers, “Ethel. Edna.” and feels the ground on his palms where his body weight’s slipped him from Roland’s grasp. The gash is sharp enough to stop the empty, at least, and the body in front of him slips out of view as he turns his head. He sees his sisters like mirages, Ethel in Kit’ arms, Edna in Steven’s, and his hands find the air on their own, as he outstretches them.

They’re shaking.

“Girls. Girls. Come here.”

Steven and Kit share a glance.

“Come here.”

It is the first words he can wrangle from himself, and it is words of protection. The pain throbs through him like waves, endless, endless, endless, his father’s dead weight behind him looming like a shadow, and it’s the life that’s taken that’s the biggest blank space of them all.

Steven and Kit let them go and they go to their brother, half running, almost stumbling, Cuthbert on the floor who still catches them in his arms, anchor solid in the darkness.

* * *

**now.**

“Save your sorries. He died the way he lived. For Gilead.”

The coldness of the way she says it. The way her fingers clutch the edges of the desk. Mahogany, and strong, and she catches herself staring at the half finished chart still next to the ink and quill. Adverbs, it looks like, of some Eastern Barony patois or another. Blank space that must be filled in. Blank space that must be filled in.

* * *

**before.**

“Cuthbert.”

Steven whispers. It is hard to say anything any louder, in a room so thick with absences. He is too tired to raise his voice, either way. So he whispers, his voice hoarse, and he thinks,

_Gabrielle_. And it is not the first time today that he has.

Cuthbert moves his head from where it’s buried in Edna’s hair. His sisters, these small things whose hearts, a million times too big for their chests, have been beating with the rhythm of a stampede against his own. He fears that if he will let them go, the emptiness in his heart will devour them. So he only looks up. Behind him, powerless, Roland and Alain. 

“Cuthbert, thee must take his guns.”

The sound Louise does not make. The sigh she does not let out. The way her eyes close, and that is all she does, silent with her hands in her husband’s cold ones.

“No.”

The way she has to press a hand to her mouth after all when her son speaks.

Bert lets go of the twins. He clings to his own fists. He clings to his own, to his own, when his gaze falls back onto Robert’s body, and his mind doesn’t want to admit it, and he says, “No. No sai. No. They’re his.” and Louise buries her face in her hands. 

“They’re _his_ , they belong _to him_.”

_Gunslingers do not weep, maggot_ , and it is as if Cuthbert remembers what he is all of a sudden. The grief had emptied it out from his mind. The grief had taken it and torn it to pieces. He opens and closes his mouth, and shakes his head again, regardless.

“No.”

“Cuthbert,” his mother’s voice so damnably low, so empty, “Cuthbert,” again, like a bullet wound. She stands. There is still the body between them.

“Cuthbert, do not forget his face. Not now. _Please_.”

For a moment, he stares at his mother. For a moment, they all do.

And Cuthbert breaks, again, only this time for good, he breaks with his face in his hands and his sisters flinching when he roars, when he screams, and it is not unlike the sound he’ll make with Alain, bleeding out at his feet, and grief will find no other way to leave his body.

* * *

**now.**

For a while, none of them can speak. For a while, there is only that: the page where Robert will never finish writing, the blank space that’s been left behind. Then Louise says, “Why?”

Again, this time, Steven feels dumber by the moment, “Why what?”

He knows. He asks anyway.

And then, “Why do they hate us so? What have we ever done that Farson wishes us such– _horror_?”

Gabrielle looks at him with eyes he’ll never learn to read again. Gabrielle laughs, and it is spilling spiders. Gabrielle. Gabrielle, whose body was carried away. Beautiful and good and _whole_ , and torn apart in the depths of her soul. Steven has to swallow. Steven has to feel every bit of his stomach swivel.

“I do not know, Louise.”

He does. The Tower be fucking damned.

“He was– he was–”

_No_ , Kit thinks, _not yet. Not when it’s so raw_. Louise. _Louise_.

“He was _good_. He was _good_.”

She says it like it’s the only explanation she can find. Kit has to look away, Kit has to breathe. Steven dips his head, “I know.”

“He was good and they _took him from me_! From his son! From his daughters!”

She stands, and the chair creaks as she does and her shawl is tight around her shoulders, and it smells of him and it does not stop, it feels like it never will, never, not now not in a million years. She breathes, the room too tight around her.

“Promise me.”

Steven and Kit share a glance.

“I want Farson’s head on a _pike_. I want Farson’s head on a _pike_ on the highest tower of the Citadel!”

There is a darkness that comes to the eyes of the two men in front of her. There is a coldness she’s seen time and time before. Gunslinger’s eyes. Killer’s eyes. She does not know it, but it is reflected in her own.

Pain translated into rage. Agony that becomes an artful immolation.

There is a promise men make, when it’s late and the blood’s just finished dripping.

“I will leave thee the head,” Steven says. “The body to the dogs.”

“And what of Marten?” Kit asks, “Marten, the snake.”

Steven does not hesitate, “The heart’s mine. Thee can have the rest.”

“Then it is settled.” Louise whispers. Bob’s letter opener finds her palm, even before either of the others can say a word. “Louise,” Kit does say, but it is pointless. She looks at him, her eyes a flame, “I will not have it any other way, sai Johns. In blood or none at all.”

“Aye.” Kit says, lowering his hand. He is the second one to cut.

Steven cuts last, and in his mind he hears Bob’s laughter like the wind. He clasps Louise’s outstretched palm, and Kit places his hand on both of theirs.

“Gunslingers,” Steven says, to all three of them, voice low, and quiet, and solid.

Gunslingers.

* * *

He’d begun drinking. Softly and then all at once, each night, like after she’d died and things had been too blind for comfort. Never too much, but just enough. A slow, inevitable climb to the top, before the headache and the nausea the morning after, and the emptiness. Oh, the emptiness. Emptiness he didn’t think he had in him, but he knows better. Steven Deschain knows it, tenderly, the way a man is tender to the hangman’s noose. He knows the ache is something more than simple _ka-shume_ , that it is _char-shume_ also.

And it is _ka_. And it is _ka_ , without the comfort of a modifier, and then the thought dies there because it is too Robert, too many traces of it, too much like him. In every bit of the words. _Him_ , spilling and spilling and spilling.

_kit he’s dead. kit. kit. leave him, kit. he’s dead_.

It hadn’t worked. Kit had broken the ribs anyway, in such a terrible, terrible way, trying to massage a heart that had stopped two minutes earlier, unable to stop himself from falling down that cliff called _hope_. The snapping had struck him across the face, and it had left him wide-eyed, dumb beyond words, stripped of everything behind his teeth except the fire. The fire. The fire, leaking past his eyes in tears that left tracks of destruction. His anger had been nothing but pain unable to find itself. A signifier skewed and broken, the same anger he had been devoured by when Tjaša had died and the boys had died, too, and now, here, here _an-tet_ between them. Steven ripped him from Handsome’s body like a creature unable to want. Unable to. Unwilling to need. In his _dinh_ ’s arms, clinging to them, Kit Johns had screamed, kicked his legs, and then he’d sunk to the ground.

And he’d wept, his hands balled into fists in his hair, on his knees. Those shoulders, heaving, and Steven’s arms around them, and Steven’s eyes closed, and Steven’s lips to his temple, and nothing, nothing between them.

Then Burning Chris had been silent for a moment, and Steven’s grip on him had swallowed itself off of him, water off the tin roof, and all he was left with were his hands to clench the air. Smoke signals from his breathing, in and out, the rasp of the choking, the tears pressing at the base of his skull. His _dinh_ standing so still so silent so cold, incomprehensible in the reading. Already the language between them was faulty, broken, untranslatable. In all the meanings the word _tet_ can have, theirs has been stripped of all of them except one, the final one. _Char_.

Kit had looked at a father with no words and then at a father who could no longer speak them. And all his love now broken rushing to fill his lungs and throat with fluid, with phlegm, with an anger so painful it almost, almost became hate.

Almost.

Some things you cannot hate. Some hearts you cannot hate or else your own will shatter.

_oh steve. steve, steve. oh, steve._

The last one in the voice of an animal pleading to be spared the butcher’s block. Unable to understand the cleaver beyond its most immediate meaning – death, blood, pain. Forced to confront the cleaver and bow to it. Not wanting it. Not wanting it. Knowing that it signified one thing and one thing only: an end.

Time too long to count.

_get up._

He’d said it and wiped at his cheeks with the back of his hands.

_get up, kit. we gotta bring him home_.

In the end. He’d had to drag him up, hands under his armpits. For the beginning of that gesture, Kit had fought him. Then he’d just let it happen, moved like a doll, his legs barely transporting his body upright, letting Steven do the thankless work of pulling him up from the world of beasts.

Steven sits very still. There is a part of him that thinks if he never moves again _ka_ will pass over him like an angel of death over doors marked with lamb’s blood and another part of him simply cannot bring itself to claw its way out of the chasm. So he sits still, and empty, and unraveled.

The small corner of peeling wallpaper. The white sheets to cover the furniture. The bottle half-empty, the light of the moon from the window, the dust delicate shaping everything into a memory, the blood stains they never really could get out of the wooden floor after they had seeped into the rug, his hat left on the commode by the door out of habit even after nearly a decade, the wood of the bedframe pressing against his back from under the sheet and his legs, those long gunslinger’s legs, splayed out in front of him. He stares at his boots without really knowing who they belong to, whose feet they’re on, what body’s this, whose heart he’s supposed to be carrying.

Any other room, and Robert’s laughter would have drowned him.

He stands once the bottle’s empty. To move, he claws at whatever’s left in the depth of him, grabs great desperate chunks of it and clings to them like a lifeline. Pulling, and pulling, and pulling, at a bare earth that can only yield devil grass, fingers cut on the blades. But he stands. Each morning, he stands. Each time the Tower needs him, he stands.

This time, though, he stands and can see how crooked his bones are, how the yoke weighs him down, how his shins are spattered with mud. He sees it. He feels it, and it gives him no more pause than it should.

The dead man touches the noose like a lover’s hand.

Tenderness.

_robert, did thee know_? _like i know?_

Does it matter? Steven doesn’t have the poetics of life and death inside him to be able to answer that question. His imagination limits itself to the bullet, and the hawk, and the gun, and what those three hold he knows well enough to understand the yoke and the noose are sides of the same coin. And that _ka_ makes its course regardless of the suffering.

He knows Robert would have had something to say about that. Something about the loneliness of the _dinh_ , and the fact that _ka_ can mean both _fate_ and _I_ , first person, singular, and that no matter the truth of _an_ , the loneliness of self is the loneliness of the Tower, supported by bonds and by beams. Eternally, eternally by itself, despite the world around it.

But Robert Allgood is dead, and so he has no words at all to share in the matter.

* * *

He’s never really known the difference between grief and fear. Out of habit all his life he has called his fear anger, he has called his anger grief, and it has made him break ribs and beg lungs and try and rip hearts out with his fingers.

When he thought Alain dead his anger shattered more bones than he bothered counting. And when Tjaša died and died for real, his anger rested against his left lung and pumped blood through his body for the rest of his life.

Now this sadness has left him with no roots inside him. There’s a nothing, and then there’s _Nothing_ , and it’s the second that’s made itself home in him. It’s like drowning only there’s no water.

Pain has stripped him of what little language he knew.

He hears the door behind him open. Hears it, but can’t name it, in his grief, made tongueless and formless. He tries to wrangle himself to look over his shoulder, to look Louise in the eye after the pitiful performance he had in her parlour, but it isn’t Louise.

It’s Josiah, looking very cold, and very tired, and very sad.

“What th'fuck are ya doing here?”

It comes as _whathfuckryadoinere_. Whiskey makes his breath stink and his words melt. He doesn’t turn to look at Joe fully, doesn’t feel the need to. On the steps, his bottom aches and his knees are bent.

“The Lady Louise’s asked me to see thee home, sai.”

He does not look glad at the prospect. Kit scoffs and takes another swig from the bottle. He swallows. He spits.

“I don’t need the pity.”

_ahdonneedthpity_.

“It ain’t pity. Sai.”

He reaches down to help Kit up. But alcohol or no, grief or no, Kit’s still a gunslinger of the Great Line, and like a gunslinger, he moves. Too fast for it to be real. A foot and then another and then he’s on his feet, turned around, and with his gun too close to Josiah’s face for comfort.

“Don’t touch me, don’t _fucking_ touch me.”

_donfuckintouchme._

“I don’t need the fucking Lady’s pity.”

This one loud, loud enough to be heard even behind the door. Because he knows. Not like Robert knew her, marrow-deep, bone-tied, but he knows her enough to know what she tastes like, and that knowledge-flecks are in his blood like bone fragments after a fracture. And he knows she’s listening. Or perhaps she hasn’t moved out of the parlor because she can’t move, and that suits him fine all the same. Let their grief fucking drown them, for all he cares.

The scabs on his palm have begun to itch.

“Or yours. Touch me again, Paine, and your brains are gonna end up all over this door yonder.”

“I don’t think that would be advisable, sai.”

“No? We ain’t got a need for ‘ee anymore, Joe. He’s dead, ain’t ya heard? AIN’T YA _FUCKING HEARD_?”

The throbbing of pigeons’ wings, startled into flight.

“He don’t fucking need you no more. You’re a dog with no fuckin’ master, Paine. Don’t you ever fucking touch me again.”

He spits. Josiah doesn’t move his boots out of the way. When he blinks his vision’s muddled, blurred, and the movement of his jaw clamps down on the grief, bit-in-mouth, bucking horse. Kit sees it all and scoffs. Kit doesn’t see any of it and takes another swig.

“Pity ain’t gonna bring him back to us.”

“No, sai. It will not.”

Christopher holsters his gun. He turns from Joe, and as he walks away Josiah sees him a little blurred, a little uncertain on his feet. Growing smaller the farther he goes.

When he goes back inside, the Lady Louise is no longer in the parlour.

_christopher. help me._

They’d used Primrose’s reins and the rope Steven had in his gunna. The branches had been easy enough to find. The knife had been Steven’s. Kit had started building the travois and Steven had been able to stand aside for so long before needing to _do_ , needing to keep his hands occupied so he didn’t have to look at him in the shade where they’d moved him out of the wa– where they’d moved him to keep him off the road because moving out of the way was something you did to objects and animals and not Robert Allgood, not Robert, not even if he was dead and the flesh was just flesh and the clothes just cloth and the hands just parts of a body.

Meat was meat: it did not care what sunlight you carried inside you.

It had taken too long to build it. They knew better. They knew how to make it better, faster, more efficiently, they knew how to make it so it wouldn’t break and they had because they had been taught well, but it took them so much longer than it should have.

Working with the dead man right beside you. Meat was meat. Kit thought about it once too many times and vomited beside the wood he was fastening. Steven had let him, looking away past the dirt road with the bodies of the men who had killed Robert Allgood starting to attract crows with too many eyes and those skeletal vultures that ate and ate and ate and never seemed satiated.

Kit had vomited.

Steven’s knees had given out. He’d staggered, first to one knee and then sitting, under the dead blackwood tree, with his hat off and his head in his hands and all around him the low, low, desperate moan of the earth. Every day inside him. Begging in tongues he’d never stopped and learned. His fingers in his hair and Kit staring blankly at his own rancid puddle of puke.

_what a waste. what a damnable waste._

_don’t you fucking say that. don’t you dare_.

If there were any less grief inside him, Kit Johns would have been scared of those eyes, blank and blue, unyielding, as they looked up from the dirt and into him.

_he died for **thee** , steven. i won’t let you put that weight down by callin’ it a waste._

Steven stood, then, and walked over to the travois. The affair of moving the body was wordless. If Steven had seen the kiss Kit’d pressed to that dead mouth, he’d said nothing of it, but in the silence after he’d reached for Kit Johns to hold him one last time, their foreheads pressed together, his hand to the back of Christopher’s head. _Dinh_ for one last time.

After that, the grief had done the rest.

The tet had broken.


End file.
